Layton eulogy to be delivered by eloquent Stephen Lewis

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He is widely considered Canada's most impressive orator, a born statesman whose most casual utterances exude the quality of a well-polished speech.

And as a towering figure in the social democratic movement taken to historic heights this year by the late Jack Layton, former Ontario NDP leader and ex-UN ambassador Stephen Lewis can be expected to deliver a memorably stirring eulogy on Saturday for a man he has already credited with lifting Canadian politics to a new plane.

In an interview earlier this week with Postmedia News, on the day before it was revealed he'd been tapped by Layton's family to offer the principal words of tribute at the Opposition leader's state funeral in Toronto, Lewis gave glimpses of how he'll memorialize Layton's special contribution to Canadian public life.

"There's no question that Jack Layton connected with Canadians more intensely than any politician of his generation," Lewis said on Monday, just hours after Layton's death from cancer. "There was something very special about his honesty and openness to which the Canadian people felt attached."

The 73-year-old Lewis — who also served a high-profile term as the UN's special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa, and chairs a Toronto-based foundation dedicated to the cause — said he did not share an extensive personal relationship with Layton.

"My interactions with Jack were largely around issues," he said. "We didn't have much interaction on a social basis."

But Lewis, now a distinguished professor at Ryerson University, was described in Layton's 2006 memoir Speaking Out Louder as an early inspiration for his political career, during which he came to embrace HIV/AIDS as a key issue at the municipal level in Toronto and later as federal NDP leader.

"I was always touched and sometimes overwhelmed by the degree to which he cared about HIV and AIDS, cared about developing countries, cared about the need for compassion and humanitarianism in the underprivileged and beleaguered parts of the world," Lewis said of Layton on Monday. "It was so unusual — the authenticity of the guy —that he could feel strongly about housing in Canada and about poverty in Africa. And that was a dimension of humanitarian instinct which very few others possess."

Notably, in October 2009, the musical Layton spent a Saturday afternoon in his downtown Toronto constituency busking with his guitar to raise funds for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, where Layton's daughter Sarah works as office manager and volunteer co-ordinator alongside Lewis' daughter, foundation director Ilana Landsberg-Lewis.

Layton's guitar fundraiser was typical of his populist brand of politics, which Lewis described as one of the NDP leader's most important endowments to modern Canadian political history.

"That's what's so fascinating about the phenomenon of Jack Layton. Everybody feels that he's a friend — and a friend that they would willingly follow," Lewis observed. "Beyond the sadness and pain of his death — and it is an incomparable loss — there will lie a legacy which continues. I really feel that."

He added: "It is as though Canadian political life turned a corner with Jack Layton — not merely in the extraordinary advance of social democracy, of our ideology, and the number of seats and the breakthrough in Quebec and all the things that are easily measurable — but in the integrity of political life and the civility of political life and the recognition that if you focus on issues, that that's the most important dimension of the political process."

Lewis further suggested that Layton's success in engaging young Canadians and other voters in the May election will endure.

"I don't think that's reversible," he said. "It's certainly now deeply ingrained in the psyche of New Democrats. And I think that the outpouring of grief says that it's ingrained in the psyche of the country."

Lewis, who led the Ontario NDP to new levels of popularity in the 1970s, is also the son of former federal NDP leader David Lewis, whose leverage in the 1972-74 Liberal minority government of Pierre Trudeau was seen by Layton as a model for NDP influence in national affairs.

While Lewis described Layton's death as a "staggering loss" to the party, he expressed confidence that the NDP would be able to sustain the unprecedented successes achieved this year under Layton's leadership.

"My own feeling is that Jack has left such an imprint on the party that the legacy will be carried forward," he said. "It won't be easy, it won't be automatic. But there will be a willingness in Canada, I think, to honour Jack's legacy and to see it carried forward."

rboswell@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/randyboswell

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